To put your future security into the hands of another nation is about as stupid as one get get.
Start creating your own IT equipment & system ! The brains are here we just need the mentality to go with them.

There seems to be no doubt any longer that Australia, and the West in general, is determined to bring grief and, eventually, total ruin down on itself.

Cyber crime is reality, but the question is whether it could have been better prepared for. I'm more curious to know what a solar flare might do.

Well the real solar flare called I think a CMB, if a really strong
one occurs could destroy everything connected to antennas, TVs radios
etc etc all telephone exchanges and power grids.
About the only thing that would survive might be aircraft already in
flight.
The risk of such an event is real as they have happened already in the US and Canada.
Virtually anything connected to a long piece of wire is vulnerable.

No system is perfect.
There will be faults and outages in the best of them.
Businesses must anticipate an occasional breakdown?
They must have a backup system in place to counter this?
If they don't, they are foolish?
Putting all the eggs in one basket is a well known cause for grief.
Can we make our communication systems more flexible?
We hardly need a repeat of the recent optus debacle

Well, it turned up to be network data from another network/system.
How easy to get trapped by something like that.
It might have had info in the wrong format, perhaps one part of that
foreign network tried to do an unexpected function and as a result
every computer in the Optus network crashed on it.
It seems that the faulty update came from another organisation.
So it was not Optus's fault.
Haven't we all been there sometime ?

Just live with it, that's the game we are playing.